In China, spying on citizens moves to a new level

China Public Security Technology sounds like the R&D outfit of some nameless, faceless Communist bureaucracy. It is after all the organization that is deploying 20,000 surveillance cameras along streets in Shenzhen in southern China along with software to do facial recognition. It is also the outfit that is programming the chips that will be inserted in residency cards for most citizens of a city with a population of 12 million.

But CPST is not a Chinese agency, it's a company incorporated in Florida and funded by American investment funds and investment banks, the New York Times reports.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

Clearly the moves are intended to fight crime and terrorism. But even CPST acknowledges the technology is a way to control the population.

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

Large-scale surveillance in China is more threatening than surveillance in Britain, which boasts several hundred video cameras, civil rights activists said.

“I don’t think they are remotely comparable, and even in Britain it’s quite controversial,” said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel of Human Rights Watch in New York. While most countries issue identity cards, and many gather a lot of information about citizens, China also appears poised to go much further in putting personal information on identity cards, Ms. PoKempner added.

China is poised to track citizens' whereabouts via their cellphones and identity cards.

When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.